Many needs of parking management, especially in on-street parking environments in urban areas, are not being met with current technology, despite severe needs to improve parking in cities around the world. The ability to automate payment for parking spaces, deserving parking spaces, especially for freely accessible spaces such as on-street parking, and provide convenient choices that combine on-street and off-street to motorists has been elusive due to limitations of current technology. Parking management systems that include accurate space occupancy detection do not include unique vehicle identification for vehicle-based parking access and rate determination, motorist guidance, violation detection, and enforcement automation support. These needs are global, have existed for a long time, but there has not been any successful implementation of a parking management system as disclosed herein.
Public parking spaces are valuable, limited and can include shared real estate. Public parking spaces impact economic development, city finances, public safety, and citizen happiness. In many cities, challenges including traffic congestion resulting from motorists circling the block due to inadequate parking supply/demand management, and the inability to incentivize beneficial use patterns and discourage abuse of public spaces results in citizen unhappiness, quality of life impact, congestion, pollution, revenue loss, economic impact to businesses, and also projects a poor image of the cities. The ability to provide motorists best-fit choices whether on-street and off-street and the ability to provide certainty of finding a parking space provides tremendous value to motorists, cities and parking operators.
Failed approaches to solving the problem of providing certainty to motorists includes electro-mechanical stoppers in each space (failures in devices damage vehicles, motorist confusion to drive over the stopper), passive RFID tags or beacons to uniquely identify vehicles (requires high powered transponders close to the tag, not compatible with battery operated parking devices), GPS based vehicle location (poor spatial accuracy, especially in dense urban areas), applications that require extensive hands-on interfaces, and inaccurate parking space occupancy detection. Due to these failures, reservations in the current art are limited to human operators facilitating the reservation and therefore are of very limited use.
Reservations capability provides a high level of certainty to motorists and becomes even more important for the very small inventory of special purpose spaces such as for EV charging or ride share vehicles.
In addition, there exists a demand for parking management of 2 wheelers and tracks.